An intergalactic refugee travels through time to modern-day Brazil in an eerie tale that has real-life corruption at its heart
Brazilian director Adirley Queirós here cobbles together something comparable, though far more lo-fi, to Wong Kar-wai’s 2046: a haunted, backwards-looking sci-fi assembled from textures of the past, which encourages you to pick through the wreckage of political ideology it strews in its wake. Wellington Abreu plays WA4, a Mad Max-style refugee from outer space who, as punishment for an illegal land occupation on his own planet, is sent to Earth to assassinate the real-life former Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek on the inauguration day of the capital city, Brasília, in 1961. But his ship crash-lands in the present day, in the satellite city of Ceilândia, an overflow enclave for the dispossessed that represents how the country’s utopia has been thwarted.
Brazilian director Adirley Queirós here cobbles together something comparable, though far more lo-fi, to Wong Kar-wai’s 2046: a haunted, backwards-looking sci-fi assembled from textures of the past, which encourages you to pick through the wreckage of political ideology it strews in its wake. Wellington Abreu plays WA4, a Mad Max-style refugee from outer space who, as punishment for an illegal land occupation on his own planet, is sent to Earth to assassinate the real-life former Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek on the inauguration day of the capital city, Brasília, in 1961. But his ship crash-lands in the present day, in the satellite city of Ceilândia, an overflow enclave for the dispossessed that represents how the country’s utopia has been thwarted.
- 7/22/2020
- by Phil Hoad
- The Guardian - Film News
Mubi's series New Brazilian Cinema is showing June - September, 2020.Above: LandlessAs I write about current Brazilian cinema, Brazilian Cinemateca, the preeminent institution for preservation of the country’s film history, is in danger of collapsing. Its employees haven’t been paid for months and the reels in its archives aren’t properly protected. The country's film industry launches strikes and petitions against the government’s plan to close the organization, which would damn the cultural heritage it shelters. How to consider the urgency of contemporary Brazilian film in this dire context? Perhaps by framing it as narratives of crises and resilience. No image inscribes itself as well into this allegory as one at the end of Landless, a documentary by Camila Freitas that premiered at Berlinale: Gusts of relentless wind punish arid earth, covering a settlement of scattered humble tents in a vicious swirl of red dust. This...
- 7/6/2020
- MUBI
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